Crosby County Texas map
33.61° N · 101.30° W · County seat: Crosbyton · 901 sq mi
Crosby County is cut in half by the Caprock Escarpment. West of the rim it is flat irrigated cotton land on the Llano Estacado; east of it the ground falls into Blanco Canyon, where the White River has carved a gorge several hundred feet deep and where Ranald Mackenzie's cavalry chased Quanah Parker's Quahadi Comanches in the autumn of 1871.
Crosbyton sits at the head of Blanco Canyon on US-82. Ralls, the county's largest town, is 10 miles west where US-62 and US-82 divide.
Where Crosby County is
Crosby sits immediately east of Lubbock and touches eight counties, more than most in this part of Texas: Floyd north, Motley northeast, Dickens east, Kent southeast, Garza south, Lynn southwest, Lubbock west and Hale northwest.
The city of Lubbock is 32 miles west, close enough that Crosby County is inside its trade area and its television market and far enough that the county keeps its own gins, schools and courthouse square. Amarillo is 116 miles northwest and Abilene 121 miles southeast, both a half day's round trip.
Towns
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| Ralls | City | 1,663 |
| Crosbyton (county seat) | City | 1,488 |
| Lorenzo | City | 962 |
Crosbyton is not the county's largest town — Ralls has been slightly bigger for years, one of the small number of Texas counties where the seat is outranked.
All three towns line up along the same highway within 20 miles of each other, a pattern set by the railroad that ran east from Lubbock. Estacado, on the county's northwestern edge toward the Lubbock County line, is older than any of them: a Quaker colony founded in 1879 that was the first town anywhere on the Llano Estacado, and Crosby County's original seat before the courthouse moved to Emma and then to Crosbyton.
Roads
- US-62 / US-82 – run together east from Lubbock and split at Ralls; US-62 continues northeast toward Floydada and Matador, US-82 turns east.
- US-82 / SH-114 – the paired route east from Ralls through Crosbyton, down the caprock and on to Dickens.
- SH-207 – the north–south road, from Post in Garza County up through Crosbyton toward Floydada and the Panhandle.
Blanco Canyon, the White River and the lake
The White River rises on the plains and drops off the caprock into Blanco Canyon, which runs north to south through the eastern half of the county. Comancheros traded in these canyons with the Comanche bands who wintered in them, and the canyon was the corridor for the 4th Cavalry's 1871 pursuit of the Quahadi, an expedition that ended without a decisive fight but that mapped the country for the campaigns that followed three years later.
In the southeastern corner of the county the river is dammed as White River Lake, built in the 1960s by the White River Municipal Water District to supply Crosbyton, Ralls, Post and Spur. It is a small reservoir by Texas standards and a drought-sensitive one, and it accounts for essentially all of Crosby County's 1.5 square miles of water.
Above the rim, the farming is the standard South Plains combination: cotton first, then grain sorghum and wheat, watered from the Ogallala aquifer and from the playa lakes that dot the section grid. Below the rim, the canyon country is grazed rather than plowed, and the change in land use is visible from the highway the moment US-82 starts down the escarpment east of Crosbyton.